Businessman Jordan Orce Kamcev confirmed that the conversations which are now being leaked on Youtube include him and a number of his friends. Kamcev said that the conversations are clearly chopped in order to convey a different, distorted message.

He most strongly denied one element in the tapes, which was seized by the outgoing Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who claimed that Kamcev threatened his family. Kamcev keeps making calls for reconciliation between him and the Zaev family, his brother Vice and others from Zaev’s camp, blaming them for trying to arrest him using the criminal charges filed by Zaev’s former loyalist Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva. Kamcev says that if this goes one there will be blood between both sides, saying both sides have male children and referencing the Albanian medieval vendetta rules which call that a family avenges the death of a family member by killing one from the offending family.

These are excerpts of a longer conversation which I had in Bulgaria and they were deliberately cut up to take comments out of context and to present a distorted perception and wrong conclusions. Four people were present and they can confirm that the context is distorted. The portion with the alleged threats is completely distorted. I’ve never used threats in my life. The goal is probably that the person who recorded the conversation curries favor with certain structures, I supposed he faced serious problems when he did the recordings and hopes that he will score points if he delivers the tapes, Kamcev told the Fokus magazine.

Another point in the conversations which has been used yesterday by some of Zaev’s supporters is when Kamcev retells what seems to be his communication with Zaev. At one point in late March or early April, according to Kamcev’s testimony, he went to Zaev and complained that he is facing serious extortion from prosecutor Janeva and Bojan Jovanovski – Boki 13 – who are both close to Zaev. Kamcev then testified that Zaev told him to report the case and that the outgoing Prime Minister was not directly involved in the extortion. In the tapes, Kamcev discusses an apparent message from Zaev that “Macedonia needs to become a European country with respect for the rule of law” and that Kamcev should report the extortion. In another comment, Kamcev says that he did plant a GPS in the luxury bag with a million EUR he gave to Boki 13, but that, contrary to widespread belief, the bag did not end up in Zaev’s hands, or at least not yet.

Zaev supporters were jubilant yesterday, claiming that the tapes prove that Zaev was not directly involved in the extortion. Others have suspected that the deal between Zaev and Kamcev, often proposed in the tapes, was eventually sealed, or that the creative editing was at play here as well. Most of the recordings contain just 10 seconds long comments from Kamcev, with little input from the others. The selection of the comments makes it likely that the tapes are leaked by Zaev’s camp, after an apparent deal with the person who was recording the conversation with Kamcev.

Zaev continued to propose Janeva as a permanent Special Prosecutor long after Kamcev reported the racketeering to him. Janeva and her selective criminal cases were instrumental in bringing Zaev to power in 2017 and Zaev gave full political backing to her actions up until several weeks before the arrest of Boki 13 this July. The leaked tapes are also used to discredit Janeva’s co-defendants Boki 13 and Zoran Mileski – Zoki Kiceec, as the group discusses their homosexual affairs and prostitution. Mileski cut a deal with the prosecutors and confessed in exchange for three years in prison, but Boki 13 remains under threat of a lengthy prison sentence and has threatened to expose the final recipient of the money he extorted from Kamcev.